Body Image...

[€uroMeinke]

I've always been fascinated by this topic, and while it seems more prevalent in women, I think we all harbor these self-doubts about our attractiveness. Part of that is our own critical eye that quickly passes over our "acceptable" parts and focuses on those things we find more lacking, so that those features are the first we see and the one's we can't look away from in the mirror.

My most recent internet searches on beauty lead me to what I originally thought was an absurd notion of genital aesthetics, only to find there a surgeons who specialize in it. Apparently with the ubiquitousness of the porn industry, women are now comparing their nether regions and finding them lacking. That's made me think of some of the things I've been hearing from Islamic Feminists about the power of the Hijab (sp?) the full body covering in that it removes the whole body from any sort of comparison.

Still, I think most of us have a hard time seeing our beauty or worse, exposing our flaws. I look at myself and sure I'd like to be less fat, have less gray in my hair, and posses a Murakami penis - but I don't, so I have to accept myself in some way.

I have no problem for people who take the surgery route, even though I mostly might think it unnecessary, it often create the frame of mind someone need to take to see their beauty - alas that often fails.

It's odd how we see ourselves. In my own experience, I've returned to photographs I took years ago when at their first viewing I could only see "how fat I was" where today I look and wonder where I saw it.

Ok I'll pause before my next stream of consciousness ramble and see what anyone else says.